The Struggle for Recognition

Abstract

This chapter clarifies the relationship between recognition and state identity formation in international anarchy, highlighting the effects of social uncertainty in this process. Acts of recognition are constructive of a state’s identity, providing it with the authority it needs to act in ways that are consistent with its self-understanding and endowing it with a recognized social status in the international order. This inherently social process of identity formation is deeply uncertain because states can never discern beforehand the recognition responses of other states and as a result state interaction is fraught with the danger of misrecognition. In response to this ongoing social uncertainty, states attempt to take independent control over the meaning of their identities by grounding them in concrete material practices. As an effective expression of an identity, the material world gives substance to the recognition-seeking state’s aspiring social identity and allows it to experience its social status as a brute fact, rather than as the uncertain effect of an ongoing political practice of social construction.

Dispute inflation

“…Insecurities and frustrations encoded within fragile collective discourses of state identity – highlighted in the constructivist literature on ontological security – are another (Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi, 2020; Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2020; Zarakol, 2010). Similarly, diffuse status concerns – also the focus of an extensive literature in International Relations (Murray, 2019; Paul et al, 2014) – may further give rise to significant anxieties.…”

“…While the relevant literature is too vast to do justice here (Tammen et al, 2021), the simple point is that like spirals, power shifts do not occur in a discursive or emotional vacuum. Shifting power relations can be unsettling, giving rise to emotionally salient discourses of self-doubt, jealousy, or anxiety (Hagström, 2021; Onea, 2014) in the declining power, and ‘unhappiness and resentment’ (Paul, 2017) in the rising one, particularly where it does not feel sufficiently accommodated or recognised (Murray, 2019) – all affective climates highly conducive to inflationary projection. Moreover, states facing the uncertainties of shifting balances of power may particularly obsess over their reputation, prestige, or status (Larson and Shevchenko, 2010), becoming increasingly likely to engage in extrapolation and abstraction.…”

Subordinates’ Quest for Recognition in Hierarchy

“…It presents them, instead, as an actor endowed with agency, capable of seeking alternatives, and recognised by other high-status actors in hierarchy. 63 Second, the value of material goods obtained by alternative leveraging extends beyond their economic and/or military utility, which may often be hard to rationalise given the goods' cost. They constitute a 'symbolic capital' mobilised to garner recognition.…”